Then, with no warning, the horse was screaming, tumbling forward, and she was off, flying through the air, flying. Flying, then not.

Ameredad’s minions knew their work, bustling her through the ancient city’s bafflement of alleyways and side streets with businesslike efficiency. Adare could barely walk, the gash on her head throbbed, and her vision was hazy, blurry. She wanted to ask about Fulton and Birch, to know whether they were still alive, but someone had stuffed a foul-tasting gag in her mouth, and between the stench and the dizziness, it was all she could do not to vomit.

The small party turned and backtracked so often that Adare quickly lost all sense of direction, and after a short while she quit trying to keep track of where she was and paid attention to the city itself, hoping to learn something that might save her life. The reek of whitefish, turmeric, and smoke filled the twisting alleys, and the streets and windows were alive with barter and banter. Still, something about the place seemed moribund, as though it had died years earlier.

The buildings were as graceful as they were venerable, but most had begun to crumble, mortar and stone falling away, marring the sweeping curves with ugly, ragged holes. Those that had not yet submitted to the ultimate indignity of collapse were rough and battered, paint and plaster stripped by decades of storm and neglect. Half the walls in the city looked badly in need of repair. It wasn’t quite a ruin—perhaps it never would be, considering the lucrative trade that passed through it—and yet, Olon was a city with a dagger in her heart.

A dagger we put there, Adare realized grimly. A wound dealt by the Malkeenians.

Perhaps Terial hui’Malkeenian hadn’t intended to gut the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kresh when he founded his nascent empire, but neither had he chosen it as his ruling seat. Money followed power, and after the government shifted to Annur, Olon began to crumble. Canal and lake trade kept her alive, along with the voracious appetite of the capital, but the once-palatial residences along the water had been converted into taverns, brothels, and flophouses for wagon-drivers and sailors weary from the rough passage across Lake Baku. A few stubborn descendants of the old aristocratic houses squatted inside familial manses they could no longer maintain, while thieves and orphans, rats and wind reclaimed the rest.